Ittiam Systems today announced that its venture into the world of Artificial Intelligence, initiated in 2015, has already resulted in two powerful products in the fields of Retail Visual Analytics and Advanced Video Encoding. Both fields involve hard problems to be solved which find immense benefit by smart application of Computer Vision and Machine Learning technologies.

The first product named “IttiamInsite” arms retail brick and mortar stores with the ability to match online stores in truly understanding the customer behavior in the form of shopper count, shopper demographics, interest on store offerings, dwell time and zone coverage. IttiamInsite uses Computer Vision and Deep Learning technologies to deliver these insights which are otherwise not possible to gather by merely analyzing the transaction data of store purchases where the shopper is “not seen and understood”.

The following YouTube video captures the essence of IttiamInsite:

Jayaraj Hobli, the Group Director, CFO and CIO of the publicly listed Coffee Day Group, commented, “We have been working closely with the Ittiam AI team to leverage advanced visual insights derived from IttiamInsite, the Cloud-based Retail focused Software-as-a-Service. This trend is in line with the industry shift in Retail brick-and-mortar stores to apply the benefits of AI workflows to provide an outstanding quality of experience and service to consumers walking into the stores, matching their online experiences. With insights gained from Ittiam’s Analytics service deployed in five of our leading cafes over the past few Quarters, we have looked to maximize our store-level operational efficiencies while also delivering a superior customer experience.”

The second product called “THINKode” provides Live and OTT Video Broadcasters maximum efficiency of video encoding bitrate and accordingly, greater bandwidth utilization to deliver high quality videos to end consumers. THINKode employs the cutting edge technique of “Content Adaptive Encoding (CAE)”. It has built in intelligence through Machine Learning over thousands of diverse video samples to quickly decide on the minimum number of bits needed to encode a given video instance while meeting the visual quality. The video instance can be as short a scene in a movie or even just a ten-second chunk. This methodology makes THINKode most adaptive to the nature of video content and hence most efficient in terms of bits utilization.

The following YouTube video highlights THINKode in action:

“Ittiam ventured into the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 2015 after having established a market leading technology position in advanced video and image processing since company inception in 2001. At that time, it was like just having qualified for the next “AI World Cup” in four years’ time. We are truly delighted today that two of our cutting-edge products with deep AI technologies are being received so positively in the market”, said SriniRajam, the Chairman and CEO of Ittiam. “IttiamInsite, well received at NRF Conference in New York in January 2018, is already powering the visual insights in hundreds of high end stores worldwide and is on track to be in thousands of stores within a year. THINKode, boosted by patented innovations, is in advanced stages of evaluation by leading Live and OTT service providers in the world, and on demonstration at the NAB Conference in Las Vegas this week. The prospective customers are especially attracted by its encoding efficiency in bitrate savings and total flexibility to be applied on top of any video codec standard such as H.264 (AVC), H.265 (HEVC), VP9 or AV1”.